Month: July 2021

It’s good that Britney Spears was today granted a request to hire her own attorney, which “could mark a major shift in how her 13-year conservatorship case has been handled” — or, in plainer terms, could result in her conservatorship being dissolved altogether, which is what Spears wants.

N.Y. Times: The pre-scheduled court hearing was forced to address the sudden departure of her court-appointed attorney, Samuel D. Ingham III, who has handled her case since 2008. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny approved Ingham’s resignation and his replacement with Spears’ chosen attorney, former federal prosecutor Mathew Rosengart.

NBC News: “Spears broke down in tears during Wednesday’s hearing, explaining to the judge that she was ‘extremely scared’ of her father, James “Jamie” Spears, and that she is not willing to be evaluated in order to remove him.

“‘I’m here to get rid of my dad and charge him with conservatorship abuse,’ she said, adding that she wanted him investigated and that ‘this conservatorship has allowed my dad to ruin my life.'”

On the other hand the appearance of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz at a “Free Britney” rally outside the same Los Angeles courthouse probably wasn’t the greatest “look” for the Spears team. Gaetz was obviously trying to rehabilitate his image as a guy who’s revelled in the company of young women, including a 17 year-old girl. Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing, but we all know what he was attempting to “say”, p.r.-wise.

I was dozing through some spritzed-up, century-old YouTube footage (4K, 60 fps) of New York City a while ago, and the musical score, which I didn’t immediately recognize, snuck up and took me away. It wasn’t as delicate or sublime as Rachmaninoff‘s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini“, but it was all sad strings and seemed to be coming from the same general ballpark. A movie score, I began to suspect, but which? Then it hit me.

It was Hans Zimmer‘s main theme (“Tennessee”) from Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor (’01). Which shocked me because most of us don’t associate whorish or bombastic or otherwise second-rate films with stirring musical scores. So please tell me which films that everyone agreed weren’t very good or worse…which of these flawed films had exceptionally moving scores? There must be at least a few.

From “Bay of Lost Hope,” posted on 6.26.09:

“There was a movie-theatre moment eight years ago when I thought Michael Bay might one day grow into a semi-mature film artist. Maybe. To my delight and surprise the opening of Pearl Harbor began with Hans Zimmer‘s music playing for nine or ten beautiful seconds over a black screen — a semi-overture, I thought at first. But the black gave way to a shot of World War I-era biplanes cruising over cornfields during magic hour — a middle-American nostalgia scene. And then the film was and up and running, and soon it was all downhill.

Nonetheless that black-screen opener was, I have to say, mildly impressive.

“I asked Bay about this at a press conference the next day. He talked about how he had to fight hard to begin the film this way, especially since it meant not starting this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film with the traditional highway-tree-lightning Bruckheimer logo.

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The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will fall on Saturday, 9.11.21 — roughly 8 and 1/2 weeks from now. It’ll be treated as a fairly big deal by everyone, I suspect, and by the mainstream media in particular. Documentary tributes, historical assessments, first-hand recollections, etc.

But after repeatedly looking back at the particulars and reflecting on the social changes that have occured since and particularly the huge mess that the George Bush administration made of Iraq and Afghanistan…where the hell do you start and what’s really left to say?

I was at the Toronto Film Festival when the 9/11 attacks happened, and two distinct and primal thoughts were coursing through my head that day. One was that what had happened was Pearl Harbor all over again, and that no one would ever forget it…that was obvious. The other was that I wanted to hop a bus down to Manhattan immediately because I regarded it (and still do) as more of a home than Los Angeles, where I’ve lived since ’83. I don’t know anyone who feels emotionally close to Los Angeles. It’s just not that much of a rootsy place.

I lived in Manhattan for nearly six years, ’78 to ’83, as a struggling journalist, and in a pair of commuter towns in my childhood and teens (Westfield, N.J. and Wilton, Connecticut), and when that ghastly day arrived I guess I wanted to experience the horror among “friends”, so to speak. It felt somehow wrong or derelict to be in Toronto, of all places. I just wanted to be there. I suddenly wanted to reconnect with my lifelong Manhattan roots…a town I’d visited off and on from the time I was five or six years old…a city I’d begun visiting without my parent’s knowledge starting when I was 14 or thereabouts…I just felt terrible about not being there. It sounds perverse, but I wanted to share the aroma of crushed rocks and asbestos clouds and gasoline fumes.

Movie-wise a terrible tragedy arose from the 9/11 attacks, and that was the explosion of superhero movies. This happened, I believe, out of some kind of deep-seated need to dramatize and savor the vanquishing of villains by omnipotent good guys…figures who would rid our hearts of uncertainty and ambiguity.

D.C. superhero flicks have been a multiplex fixture since Batman Begins (’05) and the MCU onslaught began with 2008’s Iron Man. We’ve been living with them for 15 or 16 years now with no end in sight. Not only were many of the movies themselves oppressively formulaic and numbing to the soul, but the concurrent rise of cable and streaming led to the gradual collapse of middle-class theatrical stand-alones.

In a 3.25.17 N.Y. Times piece called “The Perverse Thrill of Chaotic Times,” Teddy Wayne wrote that “the common denominator in all these films is that we safely watch cataclysms from afar. Nearly all of us saw the Kennedy assassination and other national tragedies on a screen, not in person. A common observation after Sept. 11 was that the destruction of the World Trade Center seemed out of a movie.”

There’s another thing I can say for sure about 9/11, and that’s that four excellent films arose directly from it — Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire (’04), Paul Greengrass‘s Flight 93 (’06), and Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s The Hurt Locker (2009 stateside) and Zero Dark Thirty (’12).

Starting in ’02 or ’03 I began writing off and on about the 9/11 story of Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli — i.e., “the 9/11 surfer”. I gradually got to know Pasquale and particularly his wife, Louise, during the aughts, particularly when I was living in Brooklyn in ’05 and again during my return to NYC between late ’08 and early ’11. I tried helping them find a co-writer for Pasquale’s book, “We All Fall Down.”

That’s all I have in my head right now. More to come, I’m sure.

There’s always been a Grand Canyon-sized gulf between the cinematic preferences of press + industry sophistos who attend the Cannes Film Festival vs. the locals and tourists who occasionally attend a festival beach screening.

There’s nothing particularly “wrong” with the latter preferring the simple, oafish, completely free pleasures of F9 outdoors to, say, trying to score tickets to one of the indoor festival screenings, many if not most of which would probably rub your hoi polloi types the wrong way.

Consider nonetheless this report about last night’s F9 screening by Variety‘s Manori Ravindran, and more particularly the last seven words in the opening paragraph: “F9 may not have been the planetary blockbuster anyone expected at Cannes, but amid the randy nuns, self-indulgent musicals and bovine documentaries, it was the planetary blockbuster we needed.”

Remember that Mad magazine bit when the alarmed Lone Ranger shouts “Indians everywhere, Tonto!…we’re surrounded!” and the faintly grinning Tonto says “what you mean ‘we’?”

In the same spirit, HE asks Revindran “what do you mean F9 was what ‘we‘ needed”?

Given the all-but-universal understanding that the Fast & Furious franchise is soul cancer for the chumps and that some of us could be forgiven for assuming that F9 producers are in league with satanic forces, are you, a London-based Variety staffer, saying that you…what, identify with the rabble? Or are you suggesting that F9 is a pleasure to sit through?

Ravindran notes that soon after F9 was unveiled in early June as a high-profile beach freebie, it was “instantly mocked by some who balked at Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto putting the pedal to the metal in highbrow Cannes.

“But come Monday evening, hundreds of people — [mostly] holiday makers — lined up along the Croisette hoping to score a striped deckchair or sandy spot to watch the latest chapter in Universal’s 20-year-old franchise.

“Cannes’ July dates, as opposed to the usual May affair, meant many were at the film festival for the first time in their lives, and rather than struggle to navigate a finicky ticketing system for an auteur movie they might not even like, the familiarity of another Fast and the Furious movie promised an evening of guaranteed thrills.”

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HE to Paul Schrader a few minutes ago: “Great news about The Card Counter (Focus, 9.10.21) allegedly going to Venice and Telluride. I don’t know this for a fact, but Jordan Ruimy alleges from Cannes that you spilled the beans during a recent q & a, stating that The Card Counter will in fact be premiering on the Lido and, two or three days later, in the happy hamlet of Telluride.”

Boilerplate synopsis: A gambler called William Tell (Oscar Isaac) attempts to give guidance to a young guy named Virk (Tye Sheridan) who is out for revenge against a mutual enemy (presumably a character named “Major John Gordo”, played by Willem Dafoe). Tiffany Haddish plays a character named “La Linda.” (Do I have this right?)

HE to Focus marketing: The Venice and Telluride debuts are roughly six weeks off — isn’t it time for a trailer? Not to mention the 9.10.21 commercial debut.

Schrader to L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen on 9.11.20: “I don’t want to get too deeply involved in the plot, but what I will say is [that] over the years I’ve kind of developed my own little genre of films. And they usually involve a man alone in a room, wearing a mask, and the mask is his occupation.

“So it could be a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, a reverend, whatever. And I take that character and run it alongside a larger problem, personal or social. It could be debilitating loneliness like in Taxi Driver. It could be a midlife crisis [as] in Light Sleeper. It could be an environmental crisis like in First Reformed.

“So now I have a character and he’s in his room, he’s alone. And he has a mask on. And the mask he wears is a professional poker player. And the problem that runs alongside him is that he’s a former torturer for the U.S. government. So it’s a mix of the World Series of Poker and Abu Ghraib.”

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Early this morning “Steve Brody” remarked about my umpteenth posting of “A Little Residual Ingmar,” a story about a momentary attraction to Harriet Andersson and a subsequent humiliation from the wicked tongue of Erland Josephson.

“I always admired Josephson as a performer,” Brody said, “[but] this anecdote made me revere him as a human being as well.”

HE response: “Your last line isn’t 100% sincere, but your trademark toxicity is showing. I’ve been around enough actors at parties to know that when some get drunk they become silly or gleeful or morose (i.e., like anyone else). And some turn bloodthirsty. Sober Josephson may have been one thing, but you can always spot a prick when they pick on someone of a lesser status, especially when the victim doesn’t speak the prick’s language.

“Josephson with a buzz-on wasn’t mean — he was sadistic. But then you relate to that, don’t you?”

Full disclosure: During my peak drinking days (early to mid ’90s plus my longish wine-sipping period in the aughts) I was not a happy or silly type after I’d downed two or three — I became snappy and acrid. (Which is precisely what my alcoholic dad used to do.) I didn’t lay into people with a will and a whip, but I would throw stingers. Thank God that part of my life is over and done with.

HE to community, whether you drink or not: What happens when you’ve bent the elbow a bit — do you turn goofy, sentimental, snippy and ascerbic, or wicked and withering?

Hollywood Elsewhere congratulates Alex Castro, Variety‘s vp of video, for the impressive production values (especially the title graphics) that are the best part of “The Take“, a new showbiz chit-chat show (lasting 7:40) that popped on 7.9.21.

The co-hosts are Variety‘s senior correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister and awards editor Clayton Davis, who completely cemented their woke reps last April when they openly lamented Anthony Hopkins winning the Best Actor Oscar, and, more precisely, the late Chadwick Boseman not taking it instead. Total “hooray for our side” cheerleaders.

The tone and attitude of The Take is completely vapid, of course — a showbiz Live With Regis and Kathy Lee minus the wit. But it feels first-rate, or at the very least looks slick and polished.

I said yesterday that Ever Anderson, the 13 year-old daughter of Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson who plays the young version of Scarlett Johansson‘s Natasha in Black Widow, is the most fetching presence in the film.

I wrote, in fact, that Anderson “has a much more interesting face (indications of emotional complexity, soulful eyes) than Johansson and costar Florence Pugh combined.”

Instead of a “muscular hardcase sisters against their violent pursuers” action thriller, Black Widow would’ve been far more intriguing if Anderson had been made ScarJo’s costar (instead of Pugh), and the story had been some kind of time-warp mother-daughter thing in which ScarJo’s Natasha and her younger self (Anderson) are paired, and the basic dynamic would’ve been been Natasha protecting and schooling her younger self.

Not everyone has “it,” but Anderson definitely does.

She’ll next play Wendy Darling in David Lowery‘s Peter Pan & Wendy (Disney, ’22), which will be the fourth Peter Pan adaptation over the last decade.

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I’m always irked when moviegoers react in an overly charitable, overly emotional way to something that’s obviously only so-so.

Example #1: During a screening of Paddington in mid-January 2015, a friend of a name-brand critic wouldn’t stop laughing at the klutzy-bear-causes-physical-chaos jokes (oops, another disaster!). The laughter was so unwarranted and so relentless I almost turned around and glared.

Example #2: There was an older, overweight woman sitting behind me during a 12.8.11 screening of Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close at LACMA. I distinctly recall how she moaned a couple of times when the film summoned echoes of the 9.11.01 disaster, and how she stood up and cheered when the film ended. I wasn’t a huge fan of this Warner Bros. release, but that woman persuaded me to take an even more negative tack.

Example #3: On 12.5.19 a loud Al Pacino fan ruined a THR “Awards Chat” interview at the DGA with the Irishman costar. (The interviewer was Scott Feinberg.) The guy had to cheer and laugh too loudly and go “ahhh!” and “whoo-whoo!” every time Al shared a funny line or whenever a well-regarded Pacino classic was mentioned. It was awful.

But I hate it even more when audience members are having a rollicking good time while watching a formulaic piece of shit. This happened last night as I watched an 8pm show of Black Widow inside the Century City AMC plex (theatre #10).

I was sitting in the handicapped row, and there were two or three Marvel fans right behind me, and once the comic-relief stuff started (all Marvel films begin to dispense snappy, smart-ass humor starting around the 30-minute mark and then return to it at regular intervals) these guys were laughing too enthusiastically. They were giggling and whooping at damn near everything. Any little quip or side-remark or smart-ass bit, and these guys were all but rolling in the aisles. They squealed with delight when Florence Pugh‘s Yelena asked ScarJo‘s Natasha why she always poses in the middle of a fight, landing close to the ground and flipping her head back.

Mind — these guys were the only ones in the theatre who were laughing loudly, and they were making a difficult experience even worse for everyone, or so I imagined. Did I turn around and glare? No, but I stole a quick glance.